YouSaid · the spoken record

Geoff Charles

lines on the record: 75
first: 2023-08-06
most recent: 2023-08-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter is Jeff in Tech. How can it be useful? Honestly, I mean, your attention is a gift. If you're interested in joining us here at RAMP, we're obviously hiring incredible people. So if anything that I shared resonates with you and if you want to join the team, we're hiring across product engineering design. But most importantly, be kind to yourself. I think I've been a huge listener to this podcast. It's an honor to be here. I know very little, hopefully some what I shared was meaningful to you, but keep the growth mindset. Keep thinking from first principles. Keep investing in that growth and be patient. It takes a lot of time.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Off notifications, quit Slack when you're doing deep work, check your emails once a day and just literally go through them in like five minutes. Oftentimes most of them are useless. Check Slack only at the top of the hour. Use Slack snooze or reminders podcast we could talk about Slack channels and how to organize that. But just get really good at the tools you're using. I think you're the first year consulting, we just got really good at like Excel and Excel shortcuts. And it was a big part of our training. And so just train yourself and train your teams on how to use their tools, how to use your calendar, how to use Slack, how to use email, whatever the tool you've designed as the right tool for you. Dogmatic. I mean, what ramp is a tool at the end of the day? And we're helping finance teams more efficient. So let's dock food that in.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something I've changed is more something that our header design Diego has changed basically having designers spend more time creating more visionary prototypes and then sharing those out in loop videos. It just has just huge impact on how exciting work is and how excited the team are. And so just providing that clarity is massive. And I think just again Figma and Loom and prototypes that actually are interactive so people can actually play around with it is a huge way to unlock velocity.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Continue to focus on your health. I think running a team has a huge impact on your physical health, on your mental health. And I think you are an athlete at a high growth startup or even a small business or a large company and focusing on that health is really, really important. So any tools like the whoop to invest into that is great.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my partner bought me this whoop recently wearing it, wearing it now. Gives you this real time stress signal. That's pretty helpful. But I think it's a great product in terms of just actionable insights. It's very data driven, so it'll tell you like a daily journal of all the things you did that day. And it'll correlate what you did that day to your recovery score and how healthy you are for that day. And so it'll give you insights around how certain actions you take will have impact on your next day's health, which is all about heart rate variability. I thought it was just a great way to”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I asked, what's the hardest thing you've ever done? And I ask that because working at Ramp is hard. I want to understand what hard means for them. I want to understand why it was hard. I want to understand how they overcame that difficulty, how they worked with other people to overcome that difficulty and how much agency they had in overcoming that. So it's a really good sign around what is difficulty to them and how much work they put into overcoming that.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started watching the bear a few weeks ago. I think it's a great show around leadership, around how a different industry operates, restaurant industry. My dad owned a restaurant, so I got a little bit into that. And all about teamwork and quality versus velocity of personal and professional stress. So I thought it was a really good learning.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So because I work a lot, I try to read things that are completely outside of work. I don't think I can get through any like fiction or not fiction book. That's often recommended. So, anything that will pull on your heartstrings and try to make you more human when breath becomes air is a really good one that I often recommend.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, first, like, think from first principles don't take everything I'm saying with face value. And second is back to talent that a huge part of our success was the early team that Kareem built on the tech side. And so I can write blogs all day on how we increase velocity. But if there's one thing to take away from this is that empowered and talented engineers and designers are the biggest reason why RAMP was so successful. And it's something that requires a ton of focus. I mean, early on for the first year at RAM, Kareem, our CTO, was only focused on that. It was hiring the best talent. He was a lot less interested or focused on our product strategy, our product market fit, or even our revenue. It was all about bringing in the best engineers and the best designers. And that has had compounding effects on the company and the team.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product operations is a good one. Business operations is a good one. More consulting y, sales engineering or solution engineering is a good one. There are designers and engineers that can become PMs as well. Typically it's folks that can do the job as well as the PM. And what we typically do is we give those PMs a shot or those folks a shot. So we'd give them like six months to go into a new area and try it out. And then we basically have the engineers they work with and designers they work with actually make the call as to whether or not they would want this PM versus another PM on the team.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so for me, you know, I went from college to consulting to my foreign to tech was really into more like solutions analyst. I think that was my title. I was basically trying to implement like a large B2B software in national banks. And how I got into product management was really around understanding deeply the customer and understanding deeply the product and being able to show impact on the combination of these two things. Typically the folks that joined product teams are the highest performers outside of product that either understand the customer really well and can advise product or understand the product very well and can serve customers. And so my advice is for folks that want to break into that is to find a role that is adjacent to product that enables you to have those experiences and to prove yourself. So for example”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I look for people who can think deeply, so I'll go super deep into a decision, a trade-off that they had to make. And I'll really just scratch at that until I get to a deep understanding of how they make decisions and how deep they think about things. And in general, we tend to overemphasize those two skills rather than necessarily experience because experience Again, to the point around ramp is a unique business. It matters a lot less. You can have a lot less impact than your ability to be hungry and your ability to think deeply.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We look for people who have very Strong desire to have impact. And the best way to Assess that is the impact that they've had or the reason why they are switching jobs. So again, it goes back to what I was mentioning earlier in the chat, which was velocity leads to people wanting to join because they want to have velocity. And the best signal of that is, you know, I'm leaving because things got too slow. Things got too bureaucratic. I missed the old days where we were just building and shipping and launching.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look, there's drawbacks to that culture, right? Where you get to a radically empowered engineering team that thinks that they know the product better than the designer or the PM and they push back on the designs or they disagree with the PM. But I'll take that culture any day compared to a culture where they're just taking things at face value and not challenging the thinking and not actually thinking from their own perspectives. And it just, it's sort of like, you know, I'll take someone on my team any day that challenges what I tell them to do or what I think is important. And it's maybe a bit harder to manage, but it'll make me think way deeper about what I'm asking them and what I think is important. And I'll grow as a manager much faster because of that.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your job is to make sure that they're aligned with the long term vision and that they can deliver what they've committed to. But on top of that, they can do whatever the hell they want. And if they're taking on something that puts the things that they commit to at risk, they'll communicate that. So again, that proactiveness, that desire to help that desire to improve, that accountability on their product. If their product isn't performing, if their product has feedback, are they doing it themselves or they need you to push them? So those are all like mentality and culture aspects. I'm not even getting into the technical rigor and the quality of their systems and the velocity of code because I'm not a good judge of that. That's not really my role. But those are the things that I would immediately look at that I think is just fundamentally different in the engineering team that we built at ramp versus others. And it's just a big part of the culture shift and the culture that we've been able to build.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are they able to execute on what they said they were going to execute without your help? Or do you actually need to feel like you need to be behind them? Are they the one actually setting the pace? Asking you to keep up with your specs, keep up with your decisions, like respond more quickly to the things that are blocking them, bringing more PMs or more designers to do more things. Are they being proactive in like different channels where you think it's actually your job, but actually they'll jump in anyways? For example, we have different Slack channels with a bunch of people sometimes asking questions or raising issues or having blockers. And you have engineers who are just like jumping in and explaining how a feature works, like getting the feedback and fixing a bug proactively. And you may think, well, you know, that's not the priority. I need to control with engineers are doing. That's not your job, actually. That's not your job.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. It's very hard to identify a few things. One is does the engineer want to win in the market? The engineer really care about Winning against competitors, winning the hearts and minds of the customer. Do they understand the business context in which they operate, by which they need to do that? Are they curious about how the company makes money, about what customers love and don't love, about what the most important project is and why it's important? They're asking you questions about the business outside of just the engineering domains.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Team building, so building a culture within the pod because oftentimes Your managers are no longer in your team, right? Engineers might report to different people. Designers might report to different people. PMs might report to different people. So actually building a team culture within the pod is really, really important. And oftentimes it falls on the PM to create those off sites or to create those ideation sessions or to find ways to have fun as a team. The second is making sure that the team is humming in terms of the actual focus areas and then protecting the team from stakeholders that might want to have an opinion or want to have an update or want to schedule certain meetings. So protecting that core team from that chaos and being the central point of contact if someone has a question or needs something and then being able to bring in the right person at the right time. So those are the different things that is also really important to mention.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To move even faster because they can create whatever tickets they want. They can break down the work that they want. They are accountable for the projects that they're driving. And that increases trust and moves things faster as well.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Operations, which was a team that also reports to me that basically focuses on the operational functions of product that's everything around whether it's project management or issue management or release management or enablement and content, beta and customer research. They basically are tasked with a lot of the work that needs to get done to continue shipping products and scaling product development. And then lastly, just cutting as much of the low leverage work that PMs often get stuck into. So for example, we never write a ticket. We don't spend much time in linear, which is our ticket management system. Basically, our contract is the vision and the priority in a very high level spec and everything else is kind of pushed on the engineering teams. And I think that's when engineers actually are also able.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that by eliminating or reducing the size of the team, we've forced other people in the company to think like PMs. And I think it's been a huge value add to our culture. When I say product, oftentimes people think about product management, but I actually think product is anyone that actually reports into our CTO. And that's product engineering, product design, product managers, product data scientists. So making everyone feel like a PM is a great way to get leverage as a PM. And that means basically empowering the designer to think about the actual specs and priorities and scopes more than you or empower the engineer to take something that's fairly lightweight in terms of a spec or direction and actually think through it deeply and come back with some great questions that the PM hasn't thought through. So that's one thing. The second is that we invested early on in”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have about 13 p.m. at probably over 100 engineers. So I try to keep basically a one to 1 to 8 to 1 to 15, depending on the team. Obviously, B2B slightly more complex because you're dealing with pretty strong marketing team and pretty strong sales team and pretty demanding customers that you have relationships with. So I've seen ratios be a bit lower than the BDC space. But yeah, that's a little bit of a team today. And they're organized by those teams, by those customer pain points.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, what other people owe me, and I slack them what they owe me, and I put a reminder on Slack for like, you know, when they owed it to me by. And that way it's just out of sight, out of mind. I think that the high level theme is I try to create or free up headspace for processing, not memory. And so I just basically spend very little time memorizing anything and I write everything down. That, you know, is hard when you're trying to remember a specific date or remember something that someone said, but you have a system by which we can pull these things up very, very quickly in the Google space. You can pull up any document and search a bunch of documents very, very quickly. So that's what I would do is just spend a lot more time on the processing, be extremely good at just task management and then grouping things. And then the next day creating your calendar aligned to the goals that you've set for yourself the day before in terms of the tactical where you group those tactical tasks together.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're a manager and like me, you're in back to back means from 10 to 10 to 6, it's very easy to be completely overwhelmed with a sheer amount of stuff you need to do. And so I've invested over time in just a very robust but fairly simple task management process, which is at the end of every meeting, I would write down the tasks that I owe and the tasks that someone else owes. And I would write them down to like as clearly as possible, like some vague thing, but a very clear thing and just like when I need to get this done by. I don't spend time just grooming. So at the end of the day, I have, you know, I use notes. I have just a page-long thing of all the things that I need to get done, all the things people need to get done for me. And then I spent time grooming, which is basically just trying to group things together in like logical chunks, grouping the tactical versus the strategic, the important versus the less important. I group all”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that I should never really be in the critical path of anything. So largely, I'm not available. But if they really need to get to me, they have my phone number.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we're really anti meeting at ramp, I had time in my calendar. And so what I would basically do is the Friday before I kind of clocked out, I would look at the next week. I would look at the top questions that I needed to spend time thinking about. Work on one day of the weekend in terms of deep work. I find that hanging out outside and duoling on my piece of paper, some thoughts is actually really refreshing because it doesn't feel like work. It feels like just me just philosophizing about something. And so yeah, blocking out that time, finding a space where things are less busy, where you're not in the critical path, either early mornings or later afternoons or day on the weekend is the best path for it.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things clearly. It was also a way for me to effectively communicate, especially during a COVID where we largely grew up during COVID where everything was written. And it was also a way for me to get content out there to increase my brand and ramp's brand in terms of the space that then led us to hire better people over time. So all these things kind of worked out, but it does require you to block out time and to again focus on how you think about problems rather than try to Google the answer. You know, after you thought through it, then go out and read and you'll find tune your thinking and you'll identify new questions to ask yourself afterwards.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we, and it was all scalability problems that few companies have actually done successfully? And so you have to start with your own thinking. How do we scale decision making? How do we incentivize teams to work together? How do we do headcount planning? How do we allocate headcount in a fair way? How do we avoid politics as firsthand data goes away? How do we make decisions on doubling down versus pivoting? All these things are really tough. And I found myself, you could read things. And that's helpful. But I don't think that reading makes you necessarily think better. It makes you more wise. But the best way to increase your capacity to think is to actually do the thinking. And so that's where I see writing. If you're able to write things clearly, you're able to think.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Throughout the years at ramp, I was often faced with a problem or question that I couldn't answer off the bat. And I had to go back to first principles. And the best way of doing that is to shut down your laptop, take out a piece of paper, write the question as simply as possible at the top of the paper, and just spend time just thinking about how to answer that question. And there were a ton of questions over time. For example,”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other than having support report into product. And the second piece was that we believe that a lot of our value to our customers was going to come from deeply understanding them, deeply listening to them and moving on that feedback. And so instead of hiring people who were focused just on resolving the ticket, we incentivized people to actually decrease number of tickets over time and decrease deflection or increase deflection. And that required hiring a different breed of people that then became leaders in different parts of the organization as well. So again, we could easily just pattern matched, look at comparables, hired people who've scaled large support teams and just used benchmarks in the industry. But we've started from first principles. And the outcome of that is, you know, we have an extremely low contact rate. We have over 400.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one wants to hear that. And so, and surely I thought I was coming into ramp, but I was going to apply the best product development process. And I had to shift that process entirely because the process was predicated on a B plus engineering team. And I was faced with an A plus engineering team. And so my entire, I had to go back to first principles around how products should be developed and built. So again, like all the advice I'm sharing here, you know, don't just take it and map it and copy paste. Start from the first principles that we're sharing. An example of that is our support team. So support reports into me. And the first principle there was saying, well, every support ticket is a failure of our product. We literally have that as a quote just posted on all those channels. It's a failure. If the product works perfectly, no one should ever have to contact our support team. And what better way of holding the product team accountable for support?”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really important when you're dealing with something that hasn't been done before to think from first principles. And what I mean by that is you don't pattern match from your past experience, but you go back to the fundamentals of what we're trying to do and you think through them very, very deeply. And that means you need to hire people who can think from first principles and be okay putting aside their experience. And that's a tough pill to swallow for some folks who will come in and will say I'm the subject matter expert on X, Y, Z. And I know what's best. And they come in and they get a reality check about the complexity of our business and how also you can't influence teams by saying I've seen this before. That's just like an anti-pattern. Like you can't say my pass company XYZ.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important thing to talk about here is that ramp is a very unique business. I mean, we're a credit card company, which is all about risk management and underwriting. We're also a payments company because we move money between businesses. We're also a software company because”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. I think that's right. And at the end of the day, again, the contract is your product roadmap. And that's the contract you have to the sales organization. Marketing can take that product roadmap and create market moments. And ultimately, if your product roadmap doesn't actually hit the goals of the company, then I'm accountable, right? Because I've created a system by which I've aligned with each team on why the roadmap is going to hit the goals. And so you essentially need to point back to the leader in that regard. But I can't ask every team to try to manipulate OKRs to fit their roadmaps. That's just completely exhausting. We've aligned on what we need to do. Let's get it done.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I largely stay away from OKRs from a project perspective. I think that, again, strategy. Financial plan and roadmap. I think where we landed on with OKRs were really around more cross-functional things in nature. So for example, we'll have an OKR around winning a specific market and we'll have KRs that are cross-functional across different teams. But again, an OKR is just a method to measure an objective with metrics. And you can use them at various levels of granularity. I stay away from them from a product perspective because again, I want to focus on velocity, which is just output, which is your roadmap. They're pretty strong at more of the cross-functional side of things as well as the financial side of things.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we had a pretty strong risk process that can govern all that. And the employees that were requesting to pay these bills were already on the platform. So that's an example of like a right to win. And I think that if you continue to focus on where you're uniquely positioned to win, you'll increase philosophy because you already have a lot of the components of the expertise.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the biggest values I think of software is how do you reuse the components that you've built to increase, again, velocity and impact. So why we were interested in bill payments as an expansion of our corporate card platform was we saw a bill as just an invoice to the company. And an expense was an invoice to the employee. And so there was a lot of parallels between these two things. It was all about having a liability. It was all about processing that liability in terms of the financial event and moving the money, moving the money either between the company, between the company and the employee or between two companies. So we believe that we were uniquely positioned to get after that space because we already had money movement. We already had some type of liability. We already integrated with accounting systems.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financial plan that we execute on, and each row or lever of that financial plan has an owner. Oftentimes it's marketing and sales for anything that's product-led. It's product. So that's one contract. And then we have our roadmap. That's the second contract.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've gone through iterations good and bad. I think for a period of time at RAMP, we created OKRs with financial goals and quotas to some extent for different teams. And that led to just taking a long time to plan because people were trying to make sure there was the right metric, trying to make sure that it was achievable. And it became very political, very annoying and largely like our entire R&D team was like, look, we're just going to execute on the roadmap. Screw the KRs. And so we moved from like quarterly, very expensive quarterly planning, which took one month every three months. So basically 33% of the time was planning to a biannual one-pager on these are the company priorities. And it's much more smooth and much faster. Related to that, though, we have a strong.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now every pod basically spends time writing that doc for themselves. So the pods are basically organized against outcomes. So they should be very clear on their goals. And they publish these things out. And then what I typically do is take all these documents and make sure that they're aligned with our high-level product strategy, which is a bit more long-term thinking than the individual pots, and that they are also aligned with our financial strategy, which we can get into. But that's a little bit how you also create a culture of empowerment where each team is thinking about these things, thinking like you. And the more that as a leader, you make teams think like you, the more leverage you get over time and the more you can start thinking ahead on other ways of operating.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strategy means a lot of different things. This will work. Figure out where you're uniquely positioned as a company to get after that goal. Figure out the metrics by which you would measure whether we reach that goal. And then talk about the initiatives, talk about the risks, and talk about the long-term outcomes.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say so. I mean, oftentimes people use that excuse to not have a very strong strategy. And I think that for us, we've always been from the start the spam management platform that helps you spend less. Our strategy, you know, I share like an annual newsletter around what we did and what we're going to do next year. And it's oftentimes pretty spot on in terms of the goals. Again, the goals and the value and the problem and the vision. That's consistent. The specifics, the timing, the quarterly scopes, all these things, yes, like it changes. But what you want to avoid is the thrash of people waking up and feeling like they're working at a different company or that leaders are constantly changing their minds. We've been extremely consistent from the start. And I think most of the products that we build, most of the code that we were written is in the customer's hands and hasn't been ripped away. And I think that speaks a lot to velocity too.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make sure that you're only increasing the accuracy of planning for the things that have high value of that accuracy. And so those things for us are large market moments where we have products marketing and sales all coordinating these big moments. And those typically happen maybe once a quarter, once every six months, it's basically your marketing calendar. We need a plan for that for sure. But oftentimes a low percentage of our total R&D focus. And so it's totally fine for each team to be somewhat autonomous, somewhat chaotic within their pod. They're extremely clear, but for the outside in, it might be very chaotic. But be very accurate on the things that truly, truly matter. The rest actually doesn't matter. You don't need a lot of accuracy and confidence on when specifically certain features will be live. It's much better to spend whatever time.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I will say when you joiners come at ramp, I intro myself and I talk about our product strategy. And in the meeting with an apology, I say, you know, you sign an implicit contract joining ramp. It's one where we prioritize velocity over almost everything else. What that means is it'll be somewhat chaotic. We'll ship things that don't work. We will change our product without necessarily fully enabling you. And you'll have to constantly be on your toes whenever you load up a demo instance. And I think that it's kind of an expectation and people are welcoming of that because they understand that the trade-off is that we don't move forward, that we don't actually innovate, that we don't continue to provide value for our customers. I think there's certain things that we plan for. And so the question really is like, because accuracy has come.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you said something there, which is like meaningful to you, right? So, not meaningful to your boss or your boss's boss or your boss, but like meaningful to you. And I think that's the role of management to make everyone on your team feel like it's their goal. And the way to do that is to, again, align on that goal and give it to them and to problems to solve. If everyone feels like it's their team, it's their company, their mini company, then they will radically avoid burnout. But if they feel like the work is being pushed onto them, they feel like they're not aligned on the goal or they don't feel empowered with the solution, then the burnout will absolutely happen.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They make it really hard to just be in that flow state with a ton of distractions, a ton of meetings, a ton of cross-functional teams that are all asking for your attention and grabbing for your attention. Another parallel of this is running, the best runners are the ones that love running and they feel like running is in the chore, work is in the chore. And I think as a runner, I tried to try to emulate that whenever we're doing something hard that's challenging, that's exhausting. If you love what you do, you feel much better about the amount of effort you're putting into it and work doesn't feel like work.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the beta around working hard and burnout kind of misses a key point, which is all about how much impact and how good you feel about the work that you're doing. And I think that for me, when I felt burnout, it was actually at the time where I had the lowest amount of velocity. It was when I felt like I was putting a lot of effort into things that weren't actually moving. And so I actually think velocity is a way to potentially avoid burnout. I'm not asking people to work unless hours a week. I'm asking people to get out of their own way and to focus on what truly matters, which is building great products for our customers. And I think you do that if you get into a flow state. If you get into a cadence where everything becomes easier, where work can really become thrilling. And I think sometimes organizations, especially as they grow, make that really hard.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of advice is just like being able to stay plugged in, to give engineers the opportunity to present to those leaders, present in the all hands. That's also a great way to amplify the culture.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. You can't ask for velocity and not have empowerment and not trust and not eliminate process and not increase the focus. And that requires some serious trade-offs that oftentimes leaders, especially those coming from more traditional industries, are not comfortable with. And it was the biggest breath of fresh air when I joined Ramp was how committed the team was. The last thing I'll say is there's nothing more motivating than like a leader just commenting like this is awesome on a random project channel at a random design crit. Like I know that our founders are just like reading the projects that they actually care a lot about and the engineers know that. And so there's just a general like excitement on just building great cool shit. And engineers just feel that and they're also like highly motivated by that. So that's another piece.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which one would you pick? Give them a menu of items, and you'll see that you're able to execute much, much faster on four things rather than eight at the same time. That's your job. Your job is to basically communicate those trade-offs that oftentimes are not well communicated to executives out of fear of looking like you're pushing back. You're actually not pushing back. You're increasing velocity.”
2023-08-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source